


nobody likes you

by anoxia



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: (i guess kind of), (sort of), Barrington Whelk as a warning, Birthday, Flashbacks, Haunting, Infidelity, M/M, Memories, Murder, Power Dynamics, Power Imbalance, shameless abundance of blink 182/miscellaneous other 2000s pop culture references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-16
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-12-30 10:56:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12107205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anoxia/pseuds/anoxia
Summary: Barrington Whelk turns twenty-three, with the help of a certain song and Noah Czerny.





	nobody likes you

 

-

Three and half weeks into junior year, Barrington Whelk turns seventeen on a hollow golden day, in the crisp twilight of summer as autumn dawns gracefully. He wakes up to a short email from his parents, on the cheerful side of detached, with professional photographs of a sleek silver Audi enclosed.

Czerny whistles, impressed, as he bounces onto the bed next to him.

“Fancy,” he comments affably, still bleary-eyed and soft-toned as morning blooms. His hair is a damn mess. “I’ll help you with modifications if you want. Tints would look sick on that.”

“You need a haircut,” Whelk tells him as he patters out a swift response to his parents. Czerny doesn’t reply, just cracks his neck and settles against the wall, slouching comfortably into Whelk’s duvet and completely disregarding the concept of personal space.

“Happy birthday, man,” Czerny grins pleasantly once Whelk has finished typing. He’s good at giving Whelk mental space, but never physical. He throws an awkwardly wrapped box and an envelope into his lap in place of the laptop that just sat there.

 _Mr Barrington Whelk Esq._ is scrawled across both of them, quick thoughtless letters as Whelk-ified as Czerny can achieve.

“Are you ever going to grow up about that?” he asks, not quite meeting Czerny’s eyes because he can feel this toothy clumsy smirk looming around his tongue at the effort. None of their other friends would think of that, let alone bother to execute it. Czerny is always smug when he smiles, for some reason. For no reason.

“Are _you_ ever going to stop being difficult and just let yourself be called Barry? _That’s not a bad name,_ man. Maybe you couldn’t get away with it at fourteen, or fifteen, or sixteen, quite – but you’re seventeen now. All grown up. _Mature._ Sophisticated, right?” Czerny nudges him in the ribs, too hard but unmistakeably friendly. “It suits a guy who likes to spend his free time with _nature._ Embrace it. _”_

Whelk doesn’t reply; he’s heard this pitch countless times. He remembers and makes a point to open the card first. Czerny’s handwriting is ridiculous but he holds back his usual chastisement because the enthusiasm pouring from the poorly formed letters is tangible before he actually reads the words. So tangible that he feels it as if it’s a part of himself.

“You don’t have any plans for later, right?”

Whelk looks up, halfway through re-rereading Czerny’s message packed with in-jokes and anecdotes. He doesn’t remember feeling the mattress jostle as Czerny got up to get dressed.

“No. Should I?”

“No. Well, yes. I mean, you do. But with me. As long as there aren’t any other ones...”

It’s a weird idea, that Whelk would have plans and not pull Czerny into them. It had always happened that way and neither of them have ever questioned it. Whelk directs and Czerny follows, offering an extra pair of eyes and hands where they’re needed and silly remarks where they aren’t. He’s never second-guessed it, has never had a reason to. It’s comfortable, and they both like it. Czerny is looking at him a little carefully.

“You know, like with Jessica, or something.”

He shrugs as he turns to the mirror to tackle his unruly hair, falling in surfer waves around the tips of his elfin ears. Whelk watches carefully, curious and a little lost, as Noah haphazardly rumples and fluffs at the mess on his head in an attempt to make it look acceptable.

“No, absolutely nothing whatsoever. So whatever you’ve got up your sleeve better be good, Czerny.”

Czerny’s grin is blinding, even just from the reflection in the mirror, and earnestly pleased.

“You got it.”

-

This September, so many years later, is full of clouds and stuffy grey air. There’s a pinch in the air as Whelk lowers himself into the mediocre seat of the scrap he drives these days. The route to Aglionby is muscle memory. All of Henrietta is, really. They conquered nearly all of it, him and Czerny. They easily spent more time trudging through leaves and dense woodland than they ever did at Aglionby...

He thinks suddenly and deliberately of his favourite names of Roman emperors, forcefully remembers that his milk expired yesterday, not-quite-earnestly hopes that Lynch skips his class today. It’s a swift, easy way of taking back control, keeping his memories and weak wistfulness at bay. He’s gotten good at it, so it takes him a good thirty seconds, almost to the first chorus, before the song crackling out of the radio freezes his bones and he slams the music off. He tries to remember when exactly he turned the thing _on_ , or whether it had even worked at all before just now, but the executed words are echoing relentlessly around him, numbing every simple rational thought.

_Nobody likes you when you’re-_

And it’s like Czerny’s beside him again, as if for an elastic moment he’s on his way to school as a student. He has to stop himself glancing into the passenger seat, because he can picture it, so easily, like he’s in the version of his future where Czerny never died and they never lost touch and Czerny has stayed exactly the same. He’s in that non-existent moment, where Czerny tells him the whole ridiculous saga of how he has been gleefully planning this little trick since they met, how he’s waiting for this specific birthday to come around, just so he can get a minor personal kick out of the coincidence of a song that he loves and Whelk hates. It’s intimate, and it’s _real,_ for the fact that it should and would have happened if it hadn’t been for the actual events and circumstances.

Whelk can feel the familiar heat of that light frame, how their shoulders paralleled and elbows knocked sometimes when Czerny made lumbering gestures to accompany his tales as Whelk reached for the stick. He senses that bright-eyed seventeen-year-old like he’s just unleashed the image from his own head into physicality - or from his soul, or somewhere he hadn’t accessed until he heard that single note of music.

He can see Czerny as he would have been now. Not an imagined version, but the real intended thing: fundamentally the same, just older, maybe with a better haircut, deflated cheeks, twenty-two years old and smirking that same grin he barely took off as his eyes sing every word of the song Whelk feels vibrating through his very being, like he didn’t knock the radio off at all.

 

-

The afternoon is heavy and hot. Noah has his tie unfastened and his long, loose sleeves rolled sloppily just beneath his elbows. All day he’s been grinning, or just about to grin, or just coming out of one.

“Anyone would think it’s _your_ birthday, Czerny,” Whelk murmurs, dry and simple and easy. It’s amusing though – he’s _thoroughly_ amused and basking in it. Noah just levels that grin directly on him, undiluted, and fits himself into the driver’s seat of the Mustang with a contented sigh, fingers skimming light and reverent over the steering wheel. Whelk can’t quite take his eyes away when he should, and he feels odd and crawly because of it. Like an intruder. Or less artful than that – like a peeper. The familiar sensation of absolute greed, of wanting, creeps towards his core.

“Good to go?” Noah checks as he starts the engine, becoming fluid and in control in a way that he can’t seem to manage when steering his own two feet. It’s like he needs wheels to move naturally, like his battered skateboard and gauche car complete his body.

Czerny takes them to the oak grove they’d discovered a couple of months before. Lip quirking for just a moment, Whelk gets out the car and immediately feels the hum of the place beginning to course gently through his muscles. Every time they’ve been here Whelk has felt alive and content, as if the two of them just being there sets everything in the world into its proper harmonious alignment.  When Whelk turns around, Czerny has his arms folded on the sap-streaked roof of the car and his chin resting atop them, self-satisfied smirk secured crookedly across his lips.

“But I’m not prepared.”

Czerny doesn’t move except to roll his eyes.

“We’re not here for the ley line, dumbass, that’s not important today.” As Whelk opens his mouth to protest, Noah straightens, raises his eyebrows at him. “I already let you choose the music, and you chose fucking _Keane_. I feel sick. It might be your birthday, B, but I draw the line at-”

“It was an _appropriate song choice for-”_

 “It’s _bland_ as _fuck-”_

But then they’re both snickering, amiable and easy. They shift and change together in a way Whelk knows isn’t standard. Czerny unloads the contents of the trunk, pointedly throwing a tangled dowser onto the backseat out of Whelk’s reach. He’s amassed wine, Whelk’s favourite fancy cheese, olives, grapes, chips and dips, some less refined snacks for himself and a cumbersome cake with ostentatiously colourful frosting. There’s a scrunched blanket tucked under his arm, a radio in his hand and a clumsy open smile perched across his lips. Whelk matches the grin tenfold.

 

-

On strange, hazy days Whelk gets Czerny’s old songs looping around his head. Strained voices, simple chord patterns, indecipherable lyrics. He was never really passionate about music, not in the way Czerny was - as if those distant long-fringed strangers were sharing and articulating the workings of his simple teenage soul. Whelk remembers, joltingly, the spark of jealousy he’d get seeing the passion and life animating Czerny’s face, illuminating his eyes, as he played the same albums over and over. No matter how much they hunted the ley line, how many new leads and locations they uncovered, nothing quite conjured the same reaction as those songs.

 

-

They’re lying on this thick old blanket, Czerny resting his head on the tyre of his car like a pillow. Whelk has made his way further through his bottle of white wine than Czerny has his bottle of red, the centre of his lips dyed a faded shade of rich purple. A song Whelk recognises is wafting faintly through the radio, one from the album Czerny bought for his birthday. It’s rhythmic and slightly poetic. He’s enjoying it.

“How’s your seventeenth been, then, B?”

Noah is sleep-slow and giggly. He’s shamelessly affectionate, his slight limbs twisted to execute multiple minor invasions of Whelk’s body. Their ankles overlap, their shoulders shadow each other, Noah’s cheek to Whelk’s shoulder and Whelk’s cheek to the unruly crown of Noah’s head. His mind is racing, his skin thrumming with something buried and magical.

“One of the best. Not a bad effort, Czerny.”

“Seventeen is a crazy age. Have you ever noticed that? Loads of people sing about being seventeen – ‘ _seventeen without a purpose or direction’-”_

“Oh my god, Czerny, _no_ , it’s my _birthday.”_

Noah turns to him, eyes bright and thin, mouth bright and wide. He shifts closer to Whelk on an elbow, the tip of his nose bumping into his cheekbone as he gets right up in his ear and whispers, half-singing, _“We don’t owe anyone a fucking explanation”._

Whelk loves that and he feels another golden surge of _something_ spiking through his entire body. They _don’t_ owe anybody an explanation; they don’t owe anybody anything. They only owe themselves.

Sometimes he sees the Czerny that he imagines the rest of Aglionby see: an often quiet and otherwise dorky witness to Whelk’s capers, content with whatever he gets and not moved or imaginative enough to want to change it. Like a sloth – cute enough but doesn’t really do a lot. Whelk slips sometimes and believes those same snap impressions, but right here and now, in this rustling grove, he can’t ever imagine thinking of Noah as anything but observant and vibrant and brilliant. A constant pleasant surprise that is always on his wavelength, even when he’s not on it himself.

He just shakes his head and mutters, “Jesus,” to the stars. Smiling and otherwise unperturbed, Czerny continues.

“Also Stevie Nicks, of course. Even you know that. Oh my—fucking _Abba,_ oh my God, Whelk you’re a dancing queen. How does that feel, man? Oh my _god.”_

Whelk snorts. Noah has barely inched away from his ear, his sweet nonsense nothings absorbed by Whelk’s shoulder, or jaw, as his head settles against him.

“Also, shitloads of teen movies are all about being seventeen. Like, it’s pivotal. It’s an important age, man.”

Noah gazes astonished at the sky overhead, thoughts flitting over his face every time he blinks or shifts his mouth. He looks absolutely fascinated, bewildered. Whelk never learned to wear his emotions like that.

“Shit,” he breathes. “You gotta make the most of this age. This is _the_ teen age. We have to do all that cliché shit.”

“Haven’t we done most of it?” Whelk asks, turning his traitorous grinning face in towards where Czerny’s sits, impossibly close. “Underage drinking, smoking, smoking _weed,_ speeding tickets, girls…”

“No,” Noah states firmly, certainly, a little incredulous. “No, B. There’s so much _more.”_

Whelk can’t do anything but agree with that. Everything about him, the two of them, right now, _screams_ that there’s more out there. It’s surfacing, waiting for them – they just have to go and grab it and claim it and put themselves in control. The ley line wants them. It’s the best birthday present he could get.

“You’re right,” Whelk nods, his tone bouncing off of Czerny’s certainty and magnifying it right back at him. Noah’s head bobs a little in surprise. “No, you are. This is it, Czerny. This is the year. Don’t you feel it? We’re so close. Right now, we’re so fucking close. This is meant for us. Fuck. Seventeen. Yeah. Yeah, I feel it, Czerny. I really do.”

Noah snorts.

“Fuck, Whelk, I wouldn’t have got you that cheese if I knew it was going to make you all poetic and jizzy about some fucking trees.”

“ _Hey_.”

It’s meant to be stern, but Noah must hear it in the same inebriated drawly way as Whelk does because he emits a short scream of laughter up at the stars before collapsing into a fit of breathy barks and gasps. He settles again, and they sit listening to the music of the forest, conjoined. Czerny giggles periodically and eventually stuffs his foot into the remainder of the cake, bright glittery icing spurting everywhere.

Whelk says, “ _Czerny, you’re drunk”,_ which is true, but this Noah isn’t actually doing anything he wouldn’t at any other time - just talking, not a process but an immediate string of impulses unquestionably acted upon. Lilting bubbles of laughter rise out of Czerny in the same way as his words: natural and easy, alive and in the moment. Whelk feels a rush of appreciation for the jabbering blonde. He’s always known, but it’s hitting him blindingly right now, that this kind of seamless, boundless friendship isn’t something everyone gets to have with their randomly allocated roommate.

The warm air and wine and strong cheese and the gazebo of trees are making Whelk decidedly speculative. His curiosity is tangible and something is dwelling inside this night, waiting to be unwrapped. Waiting for _them_ to unwrap it.

“Czerny-”

“Whelk.” Pink lips poised in a screwed-up smile, stained and amused, mischievous. Trouble-making.

“It’s my birthday.”

“Well done, big boy,” Noah praises dryly around the mouth of his wine bottle.

“And we have a dowser and we’re in this grove and I’ve got this…this feeling, you know, and I think we would be stupid not to investigate.”

How could they call themselves treasure hunters if they didn’t explore? How could they imagine themselves worthy if they detoured and slackened? This is why Czerny needs Whelk: to make him _go._

“In the _woods?_ B, it’s like. _Midnight._ I’m not going in the woods at night, what if I get eaten? That’s so fucking creepy.”

Whelk rolls his eyes as he gets unsteadily to his feet, bending back down to swipe Noah’s hand into his and drag him upwards. Noah, naturally, finds this hysterical. He lets himself get pulled up, light and loose like a ragdoll, and stays holding onto Whelk for a few seconds.

“Shit,” he mutters to himself as Whelk rounds the car and fumbles at the door handle for the backseat. Whelk glances back and sees that Czerny has a hand softly forked in his hair, his eyes closed and mouth parted to breathe heavily.

“Come on, Czerny,” he whispers, back up close again, car door peeking open. “Explorer mode. We’re going on the hunt.”

He feels Noah’s laugh on his face, a warm sweet breath like a hug.

“Man, I feel possessed.” It’s a soft, dreamy confession and Whelk feels Czerny brush against him as he sways slightly. His shoulders are bony and small under Whelk’s steadying grip.

“Czerny, I wanna dowse. It’s my birthday.” Noah’s mouth just teases upwards. His mild features are bathed in a silvery light and he looks decidedly otherworldly. Whelk feels the weight of the night in his chest, hot breaths dusting over his face in the cooling night. “Noah.”

His wine-softened friend opens his eyes and blinks heavily. He looks more sobered and aware than he did a minute ago, eyes a little creased like he’s evaluating something, or trying to retrospectively evaluate something he’s already made an instinctive judgement about.

“Fine, fucking- sure, okay. Lead the way, birthday boy.”

 

-

Jessica is Whelk’s girlfriend, and Molly is Jessica’s quiet best friend with intense brown eyes. Jessica brings Molly on dates, and she just watches, so Whelk brings Czerny on dates and Czerny shares his earbuds with Molly while she takes turns grimacing and lightly bobbing her head at his uncouth music choices. The voices and clash of instruments filter through into the general atmosphere of the car, tinny and too loud. Czerny smiles at Molly a lot, whispers conspiringly to her and laughs happily every time she reacts to him. He’s surprised and pleased every time she mirrors him slightly, at every little polite agreement. He slips his fingers fluidly through hers as they share eclectic milkshakes in the back of Whelk’s car, heads leaned in together, Czerny slouched and comfortable against Molly’s practised posture.

They don’t look like they should be a couple, her so composed and Czerny so naturally chaotic. Whelk can’t tell if Czerny’s genuinely into Molly or if he’s taken to her because she’s a person and he’s a human lapdog.

Sometimes Czerny’s eyes catch in the rear view mirror just as Whelk’s happen to jump there in the same instant. He always grins, small and quick and honest, no thought, just nature.

Molly’s eyes follow Czerny’s often, drifting and slow.

They linger, and Whelk’s linger back.

 

-

Eventually Whelk stops bringing Czerny on dates. Not long after, he stops bringing Jessica too.

 

-

Molly’s lips are sticky with red gloss and bittersweet from careless cocktails of milkshake and liquor. Everything about her is quiet and careful. Her hands are firm and precise, her smiles are calculated and meticulously assessed. She doesn’t say a lot.

She just touches, in ways that Whelk sometimes doesn’t have time to register, just feels the ghost of her skin on his. Sometimes he can’t quite tell _where_ she was, just that she was there, somewhere. It’s not like he expected when he watched her with Czerny, still and sure and solid, long-lasting and in control. He can’t work out what she wants or why she’s there, where they’re going or what they’re doing. Everything is a question, silent and restrained and squeezed away.

They never mention him.

(They never mention her, either, but Whelk doesn’t get the sense that that’s as significant.)

 

-

The period just after lunch, all through Aglionby, is blissfully Latin-free. Not a single dead word taught or answered. Whelk generally spends this period marking, languidly, around a vat of strong unsweetened coffee and a stack of limp toast, feet propped up on the very edge of the grand coffee table.

He and Czerny, in their earlier days, when Whelk wore glasses and Czerny adorned braces, used to walk past the windows of the teachers’ room slowly, rhythmic, eagle-eyed, until Czerny would break into a brief sprint, clutch at the outer stone below the windows, pulling himself up, falling down, jumping back up to catch a glimpse inside, affecting grotesque faces more for Whelk than for the teachers who never caught them, or never paid any attention.

Whelk feels years away from that bubble but somehow he never got out of it, not at college and less so since returning. It’s not like he had any more tempting or pressing options, or any choice at all, really, but to come back. Someone has left the radio on, some classical station, too loud but indulgently dramatic as he flourishes thin red lines through botched compositions. It’s funny. He only really got into Latin out of necessity and here he is commanding it.

His chest feels settled and loose, relieved of a tension he hadn’t even known was so tight until it was gone. It feels like - he hopes that - he’s getting closer again. There’s something about this place. It vibrates and resonates, pulls him under, envelops him, devours him, and he’s oh-so-willing. Maybe this was what he needed to get back to normal: to come back, confront it, not be scared off. He feels strong and powerful and validated.

The concerto ends, as satisfying as Whelk is starting to feel. The following seconds hang, triumphant and basking. This is a new feeling. It’s one Whelk will happily endure.

Then his body responds before his mind: tight and tense and so cold, like a struggling stream, slowly sputtering through his entire chest.

There’s a low, screeching crackle, like a cassette tape whirring and tangling, and it starts where it left off this morning in the car. Whelk feels the blood drain out of his face and the coldness of the room wraps itself around him.

_-twenty three_

It’s been six years since he heard even a chord of one of Czerny’s songs outside of his own head. At college, he expressly dodged that crowd. He’s frozen, and it would be comical if it weren’t so real and immediate. This isn’t a coincidence, or a prank. The rasping voices he has learned to allow as unintelligible background noise are now so loud they could be real people, his colleagues, sitting beside him, chattering nonsensically. They garble in a bastardisation of Latin, a mockery, enough to tease him but still keep him just barely excluded from what they should have given him five and a half years ago.

Suddenly everything feels wrong. Every pulse of hope flipped until he’s coursing with dread.

Head down, back into Gansey’s homework, he decides he’s strong enough.

It’s a test.

It’s the ley line, gauging his endurance and concentration. Assessing his worth.

It’s not Czerny.

 

-

Noah just stops, and it takes Whelk a few beating seconds to realise through his humid drunken haze that the rhythmic shuffling through leaves, identical to and just a second later than his own, has ceased.

“Come along, Czerny,” he means to sigh but it comes out as this sing-song little joke, as if all of a sudden his mouth and heart are one and the same.

Czerny doesn’t move. Whelk can’t even hear him breathing.

“Noah-”

“Barry, I’m seriously- B, I can’t walk straight-”

“Neither can I. So what? This gives us new _perspective_ , think about it, this place doesn’t look right to the sober human mind because it’s _more_ than that, more incredible and real than we could conceive of. Wine opens your mind, it makes you believe, it makes you relax and _feel,_ we have to-”

“B, just like. Five minutes.”

Just then, the oddness hits Whelk. The thing that was slightly off-kilter, different, but not in a bad way - not even a way that demanded attention, just a curious background way - washes over him. Czerny never protests (properly), or asks for anything, nothing real. He barely even asks him to pass the juice at breakfast, and here he is near begging. It’s one of the most intriguing things Whelk has ever encountered in all his time.

He turns around and bounces over to Czerny in a slow hopping jog. Though his eyes look closed, Noah vibrates with laughter.

“Whelk, you’re so dumb. You seem so clever but you’re just a big- a big fucking- you’re a _dork_.”

“Am I the man who brought all of his _Malcolm in the Middle_ DVDs to Aglionby with me? Am I? I am not. So let’s not throw the term _‘dork’_ around lightly, shall we?”

Noah shakes his head, back and forth, slow and tantalising. Whelk slides a hand around Czerny’s wrist and tugs him upright.

“Come along, explorer.”

Noah lets himself be pulled along for twenty paces, veering unsteadily to and fro, stumbling through the leaves and laughing fiendishly from the back of his throat. It’s musical and companionable and an absolutely welcome accompaniment to their current surroundings, their present adventure. Something about tonight has subdued Noah into a soft warm streak of light, breathy and smiling and basking in his own thoughts rather than scattering them. It’s so not the Czerny that Whelk usually sees, drunk or sober or sleepy, or ever. Whelk is so amused that he forgets to watch the track properly for a minute or two. He loses his constant and vigilant focus.

“Barry, I can’t walk straight,” Noah says again. “Barry. Barrington fucking Whelk. Stop for a second, Jesus.”

Whelk stops abruptly. Noah continues for a couple of paces, wrist still in Whelk’s grasp, arm extended like a leash. He actually _giggles_ as Whelk catches him by the shoulders.

“Dude. I can’t walk straight. I can’t think straight, I can’t fucking do anything.”

He drops his forehead to Whelk’s shoulder, breathing heavy.

“I’m trying really hard not to say something stupid right now.”

It’s Whelk’s turn to laugh. “For a change.”

Noah sighs against him.

“Dude, are you having a good birthday? Really?”

“ _Yes,_ why do you keep asking that?” He really, really is having a good time right now. He feels alive and powerful with potential. Truthfully, his birthdays in recent years have been the best because of Czerny. Unplanned, directionless midnight jaunts around Henrietta, armed with swiped schnapps and metallic spray paint and obnoxious birthday hats and sashes made of banners and unnecessarily expensive streamers are among the best nights of his life. It’s not even a question. “Are you plotting some despicable betrayal? Is this a guilt party, Czerny?”

He still hasn’t gotten used to this upbeat, teasing tone of his as it once again emerges, but this time Noah doesn’t react. No quirked lips or amused, assessing eyes. It’s almost like they’ve switched places, or are starting to blur the line between themselves and each other.

“ _No_ , B. Or, maybe. I don’t know how to- why _don’t_ you have birthday plans with Jessica? Didn’t you take her to New York for her birthday?”

“Would you rather I was with Jessica right now?”

“What? No. No way.”

“Me neither.”

Noah chuckles almost sadly through sealed lips and inclines his head towards Whelk’s neck. A whispered, “ _Aw, shit,”_ ghosts across the pulse point at his throat. Then suddenly the weight of Czerny’s head and the tickle of kinked strands of hair evaporate from his shoulder and invade his line of sight. Noah is close, very close, and his blue eyes are wide and sober. He looks like a kid who’s been caught. Reflexively, Whelk’s hands tighten around bony shoulders. Noah shifts closer still and Whelk isn’t quite sure if he did that, pulled him closer, or if it just happened.

Noah inches in just a little more, almost unnoticeably, eyes dragging searchingly over his face, lingering on his lips, no rear-view mirror in sight. Whelk is watching him like a hawk and pure atomic energy surges through every nerve in his body as he studies this malleable boy before him. His fingertips push into the flesh around Czerny’s shoulders as he jerks him as close as he can get.

Then, for once, it’s Czerny’s turn to make a move, to do something, to lead instead of follow and he steps up to the post immediately. He cocks his head and edges inwards, not slow but cautious, not uncertain but careful and aware.

Whelk almost says something, snaps at Czerny to get on with it – _you were doing so well -_ but finds when he tries to that his lips are already being spoken for, have been for several heartbeats. Czerny is kissing and kissing and kissing, and he’s good at it. It’s not like kissing Jessica, who teases and plays too much, or Molly, who kisses like she’s trying to catch you out. Noah’s mouth is warm and inviting, pliant and accepting. It’s like being wrapped in silk, like swallowing mouthfuls of thick cocoa, like sinking into a hot spring. The tastes of their wines mingle and blend in the same way a sunset explodes across the sky as day meets night.

All the missing uncertainty from before crops up in light retreating pressure and prolonged nibbles at his bottom lip. Noah’s cheeks are warm and flushed and slot into Whelk’s hands like the missing piece of a puzzle. The electric rush Whelk has felt building all night is stronger now, doubled, channelling through Czerny to him and from him to Czerny and back again. They’re an unbreakable circuit, powerful and secret and unstoppable.

Noah pulls back and gasps slightly before cutting the sound off. He opens his eyes, face still clamped inside Whelk’s cupped hands, searching his face desperately, prepared to be terrified by what he finds in his expression. Whelk laughs disbelievingly. It has been such a long, charged day and he wants to pause time forever. Noah grins back.

“I was like, seventy percent sure you’d fucking punch me for that,” he confesses, eyes comfortably closed again. Whelk feels Noah’s pulse at his jaw, pounding against the pads of his thumb and hears his own deprived breath beating in time with it.

 

-

For the rest of the day, ice rules Whelk’s veins. In his final classes, he is bathed in amber sunlight, can tell it should be pleasant in the sleepy mid-afternoon, but instead sees himself outside of his body: pallid cheeks and blue lips, glassy, petrified eyes that he’s seen or felt before, somewhere else, when he was a different self.

He can’t go back to his cramped, lonely flat, with its old corruptible appliances and faulty doors. He can’t go anywhere where he’ll be alone. When he gets back to his car, he’s going to snap the radio wires before he even thinks of the engine.

When he does get back to his car, though, the hum and crackle of the radio is already audible from inside. He feels himself pale further, startles at a hearty clap to his shoulder blade. Milo is laughing at him.

“Forget your caffeine this morning, Barry?”

Whelk kicks at his flimsy wheel instead of at Milo’s face as he’d like to. He thumps the roof, clips the window irritably with his keys. He bends down awkwardly to press his forehead roughly against the line of the roof.

“ _Just stop,”_ he growls through gritted teeth. “ _Just fucking stop, make him- make it stop.”_

 

-

 

“I’m _heartbroken.”_

Whelk’s whole body reacts to that, in a sudden way that has been happening a lot in response to Noah’s slightest moves in recent months. It’s similar to an old intensified surge of fleeting irritation that has barely surfaced since his birthday, all those mornings, days and nights that begin in the grove and end up somewhere deeper and closer to what he’s looking for. Now it feels like something unpleasant, something buried and vague, scary and hopeful all at once. Whelk writes it off as another bout of that frustrated anxiety he gets more and more these days, fed up of just teetering on the edge of discovery, like they have been for months now. It’s not unlike how he feels when they’re out deep in the fields and woods of Virginia, treasure-hunting, troublemaking, Czerny at his heel or shoulder, warm and constant.

“What does ‘ _indefinite hiatus’_ even mean? I’ll tell you what it means: it means ‘we’re gone forever but we can’t say it, because if we say it out loud for real, our most loyal, beloved fan, Noah Czerny, all the way in Henrietta, Virginia, will actually _die._ Like…I mean…man, the fucking love of my whole life doesn’t even have the guts to tell me that it’s…”

He gestures up and out, wild and entire in that way he is in everything.

 _“…Divorcing itself._ I think I would seriously prefer it if my actual parents got actually divorced. I’m so fucking sad. I can’t even feel my heart beating anymore.”

Despite himself, Whelk laughs. It just erupts out of him and it sounds bright, young and genuine, fresh and real. Different and new, but old and long-ago discovered. Czerny is one source of constancy that he has been relying on, who has been rolling his eyes at him in his sinking moments of doubt.

“Czerny, don’t be dramatic,” he scolds tiredly, half-heartedly, not really at all. His mouth feels long and tight.

“Are you _smirking_ at my pain?”

_“No.”_

Yes, he is, because it’s really fucking endearing, Czerny sprawled across his bed, rumpled in his overstretched jumper and trousers frayed at the hem, pale arm flung dramatically over his forehead. His nose is pinched pink from the February cold.

“Turn the stereo on.”

Then,

“No, wait, don’t, I’m too sad.”

A minute.

“No, actually, okay, do turn it on. It’s not like I can wallow to anything else. It wouldn’t be right.”

_“Jesus, Czerny.”_

Whelk does it though, turns the volume dial halfway down before flicking at the power. Czerny is opposite and behind him a little, on his back, knees folded loosely, eyes determinedly closed. Whelk can see him breathing short and shallow, but gentle, steady, thoughtful. He’s tapping one row of fingers erratically up and down, muffled in the comforter, and his lips are parted just a little. He looks so startlingly real. ‘Calm’ isn’t quite the right word, but something like it - the Noah Czerny version of it.

Whelk feels another surge, different this time, heated and forceful. Czerny looks weightless, completely unaware of Whelk, private and solitary. He looks distinctly separate from Whelk in a way he has never tried to be before, in a way that suddenly goes against all the nights he whispered some inane question or remark to Whelk just as he was drifting off, pointed out something mundane and unnoteworthy just for the sake of it. Whelk finds it oddly disconcerting, like something has shifted without him knowing it

It’s like Czerny has been half-tranquilised, softened and melted right down. He looks so distant, his soul transported to some other place, unencumbered by noise or other people, that he exudes this air of vulnerability, completely at the mercy of his surroundings.

Noah is quietly murmuring along to this poppy, nasal voice that Whelk has never quite attuned his ear to and it fits his silent mouth so easily.

_Fuck it is such a blur_

He’s heard this so many times in Czerny’s gaudy mustang but still doesn’t know the title. It took almost a shameful amount of time for him to actually understand the song, clarity finally hazing through late at night as the clumsy chords looped in his head, taking him back several hours, several days and weeks and months, to the heat of Czerny’s car seats and the coolness of Nino’s iced tea on his tongue, the lingering warm taste of it on Czerny’s, and the scent of living leaves and the flash of Noah’s almost-white hair in the lapping breeze.

Now, Czerny looks peaceful in the hazy winter afternoon, still, like he’s sleeping. It’s a similar serenity to the way he looks whenever they pull apart: untroubled and satisfied, as if just for these snatched moments the world is clicked properly into place, like he can just feel the stillness in his blood and bones and soul.

Whelk feels a lurch in his stomach, his chest, his head, as he registers how nothing, in fact, has changed. Fundamentally, he and Czerny are the same. He can’t name how they’ve changed, what has changed, just that he feels as if he is constantly uncovering something great and new and unknown, just to find himself exactly the same – still on the edge of something great. When he looks at Czerny, it’s not longing so much as curiosity, he doesn’t think, but it packs a punch.

_Place your hand in mine_

He sets down his pen and turns halfway in his chair, leaning forwards and shooting up in a second. He trudges over to the bed, still in his shoes and is close enough now to hear Noah’s breathy singalong, soft and rapid like a prayer. It’s like the rustling trees in the grove, promising.

“Hey,” Whelk breathes as his knee just barely indents the mattress. Noah cracks his eyes open narrowly and then they’re nose-to-nose. Czerny’s lips are parted, blue eyes wide and shining, like an animal hearing the snap of a branch from an outsider. Whelk can feel his breaths, the shallow swell and dip of his chest, fair hair slightly darkened, golden, in the winter, splayed gently over the pillow. The word ‘ _angel’_ leaves his brain as quickly as it flashes in. The closeness is barely new these days but it’s still exciting, dangerous almost, defiant in the face of everything else they know. Whelk can barely restrain himself sometimes, so fed up of the _edge_ he’s always teetering on.

There’s tension in every bone and every nerve, but he’s so loose that he could just fall and not stop when he hits Czerny’s chest. A complete loss of himself, giving himself up to a greater sense of control. His hand throbs, and he feels before he sees Czerny’s fingers threaded through his and clamped around to his knuckles.

“Come on then,” Czerny says, soft as anything, like he may as well have just mouthed the words. His beloved music is still polluting the calm evening but it doesn’t look like he can sense anything outside of everywhere their bodies connect.

He pushes up instantly when Whelk first strokes their lips together, steers him downwards with their balled hands. He tastes pleasant, and neutral. Czerny steals his other hand in another vice-like grip and leverages himself upwards into Whelk, pressing and pushing like he wants to melt them together into one. Whelk retaliates, squeezes against Czerny, dragging that power up into himself and using it to set Czerny as he wants him, right into the mattress, frozen except for his mouth and throat, just half of his fingers mobile.

Madly, somehow, they’re a breath apart again. Whelk just sees flashes of colour – blue eyes, pink lips, pale skin, freckles like drops of evening sun. Noah is breathing heavy, against him, into him, then laughing, sinking back again into the pillow, eyes gently closed, fingers loosened but secure, thumb skimming back and forth over the back of Whelk’s hand.

“Jesus, fuck,” he snickers, like he just doesn’t believe in anything, as he edges back in.

 

-

It happens again. The gap between the incidents is the longest yet, and Whelk spends those hours alternately trying to beat the song from circling around his head and trying to keep it there so as to dull the impact for whenever it resurfaces for real. It blares out of his cell phone this time, a simple functional uncostly thing, which is probably about the same quality as the new advanced model he owned six years ago. It’s playing in a low quality, made-for-ringtone style that was popular back then, and Whelk didn’t think that those things still existed, much less that his cell was actually capable of storing and holding and playing them.

He launches the flimsy, plasticky thing out of the window but he still hears that fucking song, reverberating and echoing. It’s a two fucking minute long song. Maybe he should just let it happen, so then it will be over with.

 

-

One day Whelk wakes up and everything is cracked, blown apart. His life is a collection of rotten shards, taken from him forever and given to the rest of the world to devour. They knock just before breakfast, but that’s just a cursory thing. Even if he hadn’t answered, they would have barged into the room and started loading his life into a truck. Czerny’s at swim practise, and it’s like they knew that, like that was why they came when they did. It reinforces his new sudden loneliness, stripped of power and influence and everything he’s ever known. When he’s out of the academy for good, less than an hour later, he just drives, hoping that the ley line will steer him and give him an idea, that it will realise that he needs this, deserves a little bit of guidance. It has to be now. He needs it right now. This is why it hasn’t happened before: so that it can happen today, when he needs it most, when he’s most focussed and determined and desperate.

Czerny phones him continually for almost two hours, then settles for lighting his cell up with texts for the rest of the day.

_-no way they’ve kicked u out??? the dorms empty??_

_-B, just lmk ur ok????_

_-man im so sorry x_

_-where r u??_

_-come on b man i know this sucks but we can sort smth out_

_-ninos @ 4? On me :)_

_-yo cmon just tell me ur not dead or halfway there and ill shut the hell up_

_-I just wanna help pls get in touch b x_

_-_

It feels like such a long, impossible stretch of time before he can read them, let alone squeeze out any kind of response.

_-Don’t, Czerny._

Czerny doesn’t.

_-_

Czerny finds him easy enough, and Whelk instantly hates him for it. He just cruises along in his Mustang, skipping lunch and the afternoon periods, and stops, half-hanging out of the window. His trying-to-be-supportive-but-also-normal face looks a lot like his usual face and he has the nerve to crack a joke that he knows Whelk would have reacted to positively any other time. Like nothing’s changed, like he can do anything the same as he did yesterday. Whelk feels this rumbling inside him, this intense unstoppable power and he wants to just _roar._

When he gets in the car and turns on the music, loud, Noah lets him. He just eyes him sideways for a few long seconds and then drives. Just drives.

_Take me away from here_

_I’m feelin’ this_

“I missed you today, man. The dorm, it’s- you should be at Aglionby. I can’t believe they would do that. It’s not like- it’s your dad, not you-”

This is all wrong and it isn’t helping. Czerny’s words, however unprepared, typically just seem to fit and work. Now they’re just making Whelk want to shout at him for being gullible and naïve and not from a background of sketchy, diseased money.

Whelk just sighs, which feels better than any of the destructive shit he’s pulled in the past few hours. He flexes his fist and doesn’t react at all to the searing threads of pain running through his knuckles, but Czerny notices the jewelled scabs anyway. His eyes widen and his jaw wrenches open.

“ _Whelk,_ Jesus. Where the fuck have you been?”

“Eyes on the road, Czerny.”

Noah defies him for huge throbbing seconds before setting his jaw stiffly and jerking the gearshift with less fluency than usual.

“Barry, let’s just go get food or something. Or we can go to my house. Nobody will be there, the drive will do you-”

“We’re doing the ritual, Czerny, we’re doing it today, we’re doing it now, and that’s it, I haven’t got _anything,_ do you get that? Of course you don’t get that, Czerny, _you_ haven’t been kicked out of your school, your _home_. You’re still living there, you weren’t even _there_ as it happened, you’re supposed to be- I bet you’re- Shit, would you just fucking drive and shut up for once, okay? I don’t need this.”

Czerny’s eyes drag upwards over him, steeled with something Whelk has never had turned upon himself before, but he stays silent and slides back into driving like he’s swimming.

A few minutes later, eyes closed and breathing shallow, head pressed against the warm tinted glass, Whelk sighs again. The rest of his voice charges into the sound, turning the soft release into an ugly, ragged groan. He hears Noah swallow, senses how his hands hover and falter around the wheel.

_“Fuck, Czerny.”_

It’s the most unstable, pathetic thing he’s ever heard, and it’s come from his own mouth. He presses his eyes closed further. A damp palm closes around his shoulder and squeezes lingeringly, fading away slowly, bony backs of fingers staggering down his arm and away. Obediently, though, Noah says nothing.

 

-

Whelk is sitting on a bench on the side of the road, about a hundred metres from his car, drinking a vanilla shake that’s turned all watery and weird because of the bourbon he drowned it with. All he can think about is the unfairness of it all. St Mark’s Day is supposed to be an isolated, annual incident. Twenty-four hours of hell, twenty-four hours where he’s allowed to slip up and remember Czerny. Twenty-four hours per year, on the anniversary of the day of the most despicable hour of his life, is _fair._ The fact that now his birthday is looking to be written off as well is a joke.

Czerny never was very funny.

_-_

Czerny pulls up slowly when they arrive at the grove, shutting down the engine softly, with a care he never usually thinks to execute, so the life just fades out of it and they’re suffocated by the silence. Even with his eyes screwed tight, Whelk can feel worried blue eyes scraping back and forth, all over him, relentless and unashamed in their raw, exposed emotion. When Noah tentatively slides an untouched burger towards him across the dashboard, Whelk tosses his head away and flings the car door open and throws himself out into the fresh air after it.

Czerny watches him sadly, sidelong. He’s still as anything for a long time and Whelk leans against the screaming red back door of the Mustang, just waiting because he can’t move or speak. He’s burning, numb, with the energy of the place, and finally something about this cesspit of a day feels real and right.

He can’t help himself, can’t hold back any longer and he pushes violently off the side of Czerny’s eyesore and starts to rifle through the contents of the trunk. Noah watches him in the rear-view for a long pulsing moment, then takes a huge, bracing bite of his own burger and sets it down on the seat beside him.

 

-

By the time he decides he has to go back to the apartment, it’s not long until midnight, when this should all finally end – for another six months at least. He has a stack of papers to grade that he couldn’t get to in the car, because of the radio, and that he couldn’t take into one of Henrietta’s gas station diners, also because of the radio, but as he tries to unlock his door – the way he can without a key, when he has his hands full or has forgotten it – he can already hear it. The only reason he knows it isn’t the version in his own mind is because it picks up at a completely different place to where he last found it in his head, the place in the song his cell cut off on the other side of the road when a truck mowed over it.

He doesn’t bother to think about where it’s coming from or trying to stop it, not now. He just beelines for the cupboard with his dregs of alcohol – tiny bottles of gin, and whiskey, and vodka, from Christmas giftsets, the odd can of beer from god knows where – keepsakes from college, perhaps.

Tonight Whelk occupies the same couch seat he sinks further into every single other night, a small collection of liquids in his lap, and it takes longer than he thought, maybe a few minutes, before that melody – synonymous, now, with Noah Czerny and his death and Whelk himself and the entirety of the last ten years – bleeds into every grey corner of his hole of an apartment. He closes his eyes, and lets it.

 

-

The first hit is clumsy, shaky. He clips Czerny across the cheek, hard, but it’s not nearly the clean crack in the temple he pictured thirty seconds ago when his fingers curled against the underside of the skateboard. Still, Czerny is winded and for a split second it’s enough to make him want to stop the whole thing, joke it off badly, but in the next beat he feels this surge through his chest and arms, hot and urgent, like the ley line is making him promises already. Like this really is the right way.

The gasp is sharper this time, but more internal. Czerny clutches at his head, his face, like he’s not sure whether to soothe or protect himself. Whelk just goes for it, three fast times. His fingers are white and burning, wired around the sloped end of the board. He catches sight of a new sticker every time he raises it – the scratchy Blink 182 face, the custom made Aglionby crest, stylised band logos he’s never bothered to memorise but for some reason knows anyway.

Czerny buckles, all of a sudden, like he’s given up trying to hold himself upright, and Whelk feels something like relief. That makes it easier. Eventually, suddenly, he starts to notice this huge red blotch on Czerny’s cheek, scarlet and luminous like a poison apple. He’s down, clawing at the ground, gasping and heaving and _he still doesn’t feel anything_ except a throbbing hot numbness in his fingertips.

There’s going to be more.

There absolutely has to be more.

-

_All that it means is I’ll always be dreaming of you_

**Author's Note:**

> Absolutely not an endorsement/justification of/excuse for Barrington Whelk and his actions in any way. Should be obvious but just in case.
> 
> Also I wrote this over a year ago, last edited it around the same time and it was originally meant to be like a 2000 word job max but we have this and I still quite liked it when I reread/tweaked it to finally post it so it's seeing the light of day :-) (apologies for any mistakes, I read through one version and then another and I didn't want to reread the entire thing again so I just cut the extra bits in, hopefully unnoticeably)


End file.
